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Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

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Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#191

Post by Marsymars »

joshstrange wrote: post #8
semiquaver wrote: post #4

The thing about speed tests causing a bad experience because they hog airtime felt like a non sequitur (since performing them is rare and manual) until I saw this: > Many ISPs, device manufacturers, and consumers automate periodic, high-intensity speed tests that negatively impact the consumer internet experience as demonstrated But there’s no support for this claim presented frankly I am skeptical. What WiFi devices…

Eero does this automatically (mine says it was last run 2 days ago at 5:08am) and I had software on my DD-WRT router (OpenLede) that did it, though obviously not many people (overall) are running that. I used to run a docker than ran a speed test every hour and graphed the results but I haven't done that in a while now.

Eero I think just tests internet speed from the gateway, so no Wi-Fi involved.

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#192

Post by bobmcnamara »

amluto wrote: post #185
bobmcnamara wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IEEE 802.11af old TV band IEEE 802.11ah 900Ish IEEE 802.11ax(WiFi6): traditional channels can be subdivided between 26 and 2x996 resource units according to need(effectively a 2MHz channel at the low end). This means multiple devices can be transmitted to within the same transmit opportunity. > How about some modulations designed to work at low received power and/or low SNR? 802.11(og), 1 & 2 Mbps.

And do those ax resource units work, in practice, in a way that allows two APs that are moderately close to each other to coexist efficiently within the same 20MHz channel? Preferably even if they’re from different vendors and even if the users are not experts? > 802.11(og), 1 & 2 Mbps I’m a little vague on the details, but those are rather old and I don’t think there is anything that low-rate in the current MCS tabl…

> > 802.11(og), 1 & 2 Mbps > I’m a little vague on the details, but those are rather old

They're the original, phase shift keyed modulations.

> Do they actually work well?

They work great, if your problem is SNR, and if you value range more than data rate.

They are, of course, horribly spectrally inefficient which means they work better than OFDM near the guard bands. OFDM has a much flatter power level over frequency, so you have to limit TX power whenever the shoulder of the signal nears the guard band. IIRC, some standard supports individually adjusting the resource unit transmit power which would solve this as well. PSK modulation solves this somewhat accidentally. Guardbands especially suck since there's only 3 non overlapping 2.4GHz channels.

> I don’t think there is anything that low-rate in the current MCS table.

> Do they support modern advancements like LDPC?

Dunno! Generally though, each MCS index will specify both a modulation mechanism (BPSK, OFDM, ...) and a coding rate. All of the newer specs allow you to go almost as slow if you want to, usually 6-7mbps ish , and this is done with the same modulation scheme just a bit faster and with newer coding.

> do those ax resource units work, in practice, in a way that allows two APs that are moderately close to each other to coexist efficiently within the same 20MHz channel?

Yes and no. It doesn't improve RF coexistence directly. But in many cases allows much more efficient use of the available airtime. Before every outgoing packet to a different station consumed a guard interval and the entire channel bandwidth, but now for a single guard interval you can pack as many station's data as will fit.

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#193

Post by silversmith »

godelski wrote: post #145
marssaxman wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The house I live in was built with ethernet, but of the fourteen outlets the builders saw fit to include, not one is located where we can make use of it. The two devices in our house which use a wired connection are both plugged directly into the switch in our utility closet. (We do have one internet-connected device which permanently lives about an inch away from one of the ethernet sockets, but it is, ironically, a…

Rental or do you own? If you own, you should replace and/or move them. Might sound scary if you've never done this before but it is much easier than you'd think. If you want to make your future life easier I suggest running a PVC pipe (at minimum in the drop down portion). Replacing or adding new cabling will be much easier if you do this so it's totally worth the few extra bucks and few extra minutes of work. They'l…

There are times I do envy people living in stick houses with hollow walls.

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#194

Post by toast0 »

silversmith wrote: post #193
godelski wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rental or do you own? If you own, you should replace and/or move them. Might sound scary if you've never done this before but it is much easier than you'd think. If you want to make your future life easier I suggest running a PVC pipe (at minimum in the drop down portion). Replacing or adding new cabling will be much easier if you do this so it's totally worth the few extra bucks and few extra minutes of work. They'l…

There are times I do envy people living in stick houses with hollow walls.

Stick houses with hollow walls are cheaper to build (assuming cheap wood) and cheaper to work on. Probably cheaper to maintain too, but not as durable, so it might work out... Otoh, durable isn't great when housing trends have moved on.

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#195

Post by ssl-3 »

jdeibele wrote: post #44
typpilol wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that most people only have a single cord coming into the house So they would have to do quite a bit of work to run cable. Also people living in apartments that cant just start drilling through walls. I'd say most ppl use wifi because they have too, not pure convenience

We downsized from a house built in 1914 with phone jacks everywhere to a house built in 2007 with coax and ethernet ports in every room, some rooms with two. At the 1914 house, I used ethernet-over-powerline adapters so I could have a second router running in access point mode. The alternative was punching holes in the outside walls since there was no way to feasibly run cabling inside lath-and-plaster walls. I don't…

> I don't know how 2025 houses are built but I would be surprised if they didn't have an ethernet jack in every room to a wiring closet of some sort. Not sure about coax.

Aye.

Cat5/6/whatever-ish cabling has been both the present and the future for something on the order of 25 years now. It's as much of a no-brainer to build network wiring into a home today as it once was to build telephone and TV wiring into a home. Networking should be part of all new home builds.

And yet: Here in 2025, I'm presently working on a new custom home, wherein we're installing some vaguely-elaborate audio-visual stuff. The company in charge of the LAN/WAN end of things had intended to have the ISP bring fiber WAN into a utility area of the basement (yay fiber!), and put a singular Eeros router/mesh node there, and have that be that.

The rest of the house? More mesh nodes, just wirelessly-connected to eachother. No other installed network wires at all -- in a nicely-finished and fairly opulent house that is owned by a very successful local doctor.

They didn't even understand why we were planning to cable up the televisions and other AV gear that would otherwise be scooping up finite wireless bandwidth from their fixed, hard-mounted locations.

In terms of surprise: Nothing surprises me now.

(In terms of cost: We wound up volunteering to run wiring for the mesh nodes. It will cost us ~nothing on the scale that we're operating at, and we're already installing cabling... and not doing it this way just seems so profoundly dumb.)

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#196

Post by varenc »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I did some experimentation with UniFi hubs and came to the conclusion that if you can give each device its own WiFi channel that would be ideal -- contention is that bad and often an uncontended channel with otherwise poor characteristics will beat a contended channel that otherwise looks good. The other bit of advice that is buried in there that no-one wants to hear for residences is the best way to speed up your Wi…

An idle Wi-Fi client with no traffic should have a very minimal effect on your network's quality. The TV is only going to be slowing things down if it's actually using the network and downloading/uploading. Which regrettably, is a problem with smart TVs. But there's no reason to limit the number of idle clients on a Wi-Fi network assuming your gateway can handle it. The challenge is though in the real world many devices that should be idle aren't.

For my IoT network I just block most every device's access to the internet. That cuts down on a lot of their background chatter and gives me some minor protection.

Also honestly, I feel the majority of wifi problems could be fixed by having proper coverage (more access points), using hardwired access points (no meshing), and getting better equipment. I like Ubiquiti/Unifi stuff but other good options out there. Avoid TP-Link and anything provided by an ISP. If you do go meshing, insist on a 6ghz backhaul, though that hurts the range.

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#197

Post by hvb2 »

silversmith wrote: post #193
godelski wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rental or do you own? If you own, you should replace and/or move them. Might sound scary if you've never done this before but it is much easier than you'd think. If you want to make your future life easier I suggest running a PVC pipe (at minimum in the drop down portion). Replacing or adding new cabling will be much easier if you do this so it's totally worth the few extra bucks and few extra minutes of work. They'l…

There are times I do envy people living in stick houses with hollow walls.

Until it gets cold outside and you need to heat them, or cool then obviously

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#198

Post by toast0 »

StillBored wrote: post #142
typpilol wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that most people only have a single cord coming into the house So they would have to do quite a bit of work to run cable. Also people living in apartments that cant just start drilling through walls. I'd say most ppl use wifi because they have too, not pure convenience

A lot has changed in the 25 years since gbit wired ethernet was rolled out. While wired ethernet stagnated due to greed. Got powerlines? Well then you can get gbit+ to a few outlets in your house. Got old CATV cables? Then you can use them at multiple gbit with MoCA. Got old phone lines? Then its possible to run ethernet over them with SPE and maybe get a gbit. And frankly just calling someone who wires houses and ge…

> Got old phone lines? Then its possible to run ethernet over them with SPE and maybe get a gbit.

Depending on the age of the house, there's a chance that phone lines are 4-pair, and you can probably run 1G on 4-pair wire, it's probably at least cat3 if it's 4-pair and quality cat3 that's not a max length run in dense conduit is likely to do gigE just fine. If it's only two-pair, you can still run 100, but you'll want to either run a managed switch that you can force to 100M or find an unmanaged switch that can't do 1G ... Otherwise you're likely to negotiate to 1G which will fail because of missing pairs.

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#199

Post by varenc »

m463 wrote: post #143
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I did some experimentation with UniFi hubs and came to the conclusion that if you can give each device its own WiFi channel that would be ideal -- contention is that bad and often an uncontended channel with otherwise poor characteristics will beat a contended channel that otherwise looks good. The other bit of advice that is buried in there that no-one wants to hear for residences is the best way to speed up your Wi…

> not use it. A few things come to mind... - You can buy ethernet adapters... for iPhone/ipad/etc. Operations are so much faster, especially large downloads like offline maps. - many consumer devices suck wrt to wifi. For example, there seem to me ZERO soundbars with wired subwoofers. They all incorporate wifi. - also, if anyone has lived in a really dense urban environment, wifi is a liability in just about every wa…

> Why do macs show all the neighbor's televisions in the airplay menu?

That's a feature that can be configured on the TV/AirPlay receiver. They've configured to allow streaming from "Anyone", which is probably the default. They could disable this is setting and limit it to only clients on their home network. And you can't actually stream without entering a confirmation code shown on the TV.

When you stream to an AirPlay device this way it sets up an adhoc device-to-device wireless connection which usually performs much better that using a wifi network/router and is why screen sharing can be so snappy. Part of the 'Apple Wireless Direct Link' proprietary secret sauce also used by AirDrop. You can sniff the awdl0 or llw0 interfaces to see the traffic. Open AirDrop and then run `ping6 ff02::1%awdl0` to see all the Apple devices your Mac is in contact with (not necessarily on your wifi network)

> and you can't really turn off wifi on a mac without turning off sip.

Just `sudo ifconfig en0 down` doesn't work? You can also do `networksetup -setairportpower en0 off`. Never had issues turning off wifi.

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#200

Post by LikeBeans »

I'm surprised, at least for businesses, small cell wifi is not a thing. For example, if you walk into an office building everyone seems to have a physical phone on their desk that is hard wired. What if that is also a small cell AP. Like a personal AP. Using automation and central provisioning and analytics can make this doable. Yeah handoff and roaming has to be seamless and quick but it doesn't feel that hard, no? If so this would be pretty neat and would solve the contention issue in the air.
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